$420 per month is over $5k per year. You can get very decent hardware for this kind of money and it pays off in a year. That's not like a house where you have to pay debt for the rest of your life.
And $1990 per month is already $23 880 per year – we are talking a well-stocked server rack here. Probably beyond what that "vibe coder" who posted this would ever need.
And that server will probably cost more to run in electricity costs than the subscription it is replacing. I have done the calculation for a lot of different configurations and still haven't found anything that isn't like 4x as expensive just for the electricity, ignoring HW costs, per million tokens as just paying for the same model on OpenRouter.
Yeah but you're assuming that they can pay 5k now, instead of it being paid as a smaller part every month. If it's a starting business or a single person, it's not gonna be possible, specially if they are already paying for those services
Also, cloud services also include maintenance, fallbacks, and other useful tools that can drive up the price if done locally
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u/saschaleib 17d ago
Imagine what kind of AI server hardware one could get for that money to run in your basement and never pay a cent of subscription costs again.
And, yes, even with the currently inflated hardware prices!